A sarcastic veterinary blog dedicated to all of the money grubbing vets out there who are fed up with the insanity of the American public.

Monday, July 8, 2013

Almost Perfect

Some good comes from putting a few decades behind ya, but
sometimes it seems as if the negatives outnumber the pluses. This is a closely
held secret, but after passing the magic 45-50 year old barrier, and the
letters from the AARP folks start showing up un-invited in your mailbox, your
eyes go off warranty. And your arms get shorter. Those who didn’t wear glasses…
begin to wear glasses, and if you can’t find your reading glasses when you need
them, look first to your forehead before you trash the entire house. And if you
do wear glasses, get used to the lower part of the lenses going weird on you.

I won’t go into the adjustments this requires in surgery, or
in tying a fly to your tippet while standing thigh deep in a Montana trout
stream. But I will tell you that this new development plays havoc with your
target shooting. You can still see the target, standing still waiting for you
way out there, but the sights on your pistol or rifle take on a whole new
dimension, or dimensions if the truth be told. Shooting by braille has some
entertainment value, but what might once have represented precision soon takes
on more of a comedic turn.

Which is why I’ve been adding telescopic sights to some of
the old rifles, for I still enjoy playing with them, and I’d still like to do
it well. Scoped rifles don’t care if your eyes are old.

The ancestors of this particular rifle go back to the
military over fifty years ago, and thus it had no provisions for attaching
telescopic sights. Took a little ingenuity and time spent on the net to
assemble the parts, but said parts were attached to the rifle last weekend, and
I got to shoot it today. But first I needed to “sight it in”.

I won’t bore you with the details, but certain adjustments
to a newly mounted scope sight need to be made so it points you in the right
direction. Long story short, you fire the rifle at the rather large target
placed not all that far away, and then adjust the scoped sight so that you put
the bullets you send down range into that little part of the center of the
target. You look at the holes you just made in the paper, and then you adjust
the sights until the holes show up in the correct place.

If I had not forgotten my spotting scope, the device capable
of significant magnification so I could actually see those small holes in the
paper target, this would have been a simple task. Fortunately, the guy shooting
from the bench next to mine offered to spot for me, using the higher
magnification of his rifle’s telescopic sight. With his help, within minutes
I’d made the appropriate adjustments, and my holes were where they belonged.
Such friendly cooperation is the norm at rifle ranges, and I thanked him for
his assist.

During the next ceasefire, I moved my target farther out, to
the 100 yard line, and then I had a moment to talk with my neighbor. He
remembered me from some years ago.

His dog was named Sargent. She broke with parvo back in the
first days of the disease, in the early eighties. We saw way too much parvo
back then, and watched so many die. Sargent was a corgi/beagle mix, and I had
conned him into treating the puppy with the notion that beagles could survive
anything. She did eventually recover, but she had a long and difficult time. I
asked if this was the pup I’d assigned a nickname.And he said yes.

I called her SARG, during those times when I went back to
the isolation ward to talk with her and pet her and hopefully cheer her on with
something besides drugs and fluids. And for all the years later, she was SARG
to me. And he remembered that.

This man talked of how in the beginning, he had tried to
talk his wife into just dumping the little pup at the pound rather than treat
her. He talked of how he had grown up on a ranch where the dogs were tools and
if one ran under the truck tire, you simply got a new dog. He had seen no need
to invest effort or money into medical care for a pup they had just acquired.
And he remembered how I had talked him into treating her.

And then he talked of how surprised he was that SARG was
always thrilled to come see us, and she got excited as the car drove near, and
then ran into my clinic. And he talked of how he grew to like her, and she
slept in his lap and next to him in the bed, and he had wondered how he had
once lived without such love and devotion.

And then he said that after 20 years the time came when SARG
was so old and so sick that the only choice remaining was a quiet release into
the other side. And he stood there at a rifle range, and he said to me that he
must have been the worst, the most pathetic sobbing mess I’d ever seen as his
dog left this earth with my help. And yet he seemed so grateful, as we stood
there, and I could read it in his eyes, and then he offered me his hand to
shake. For the unspoken….that I’d given his pup the chance to love him for twenty
years, and him the chance to love her back.

The range master released us, and I went to my bench and
loaded my rifle and sent one round downrange, and then I stopped and unloaded
the rifle. Only one round sent downrange. I sat there for the ten minutes, and
then during the next ceasefire, I walked out to my target.

The hole in the target was within millimeters of a perfect
center hit. It was as close to perfection as I am likely to ever see.

And as I contemplated the time spent with this man, and
remembered his wonderful little dog and saw how he had loved her, and I looked
back on four decades of this practice of veterinary medicine, all I could
conclude was….it was as close to perfection as I am ever likely to see.

Beautiful post. I have to say I thought Sarg's dad was going to turn out to be the type of client this blog was created for, but I'm glad I was wrong. I guess experiences like these are the ones that make us keep showing up to work.

Things

Welcome to the VBB Blog! Thanks for stopping by. For more information about us, please see this post.

Do you have something to say? Stories to share? If you'd like to submit a guest post for consideration, please write to us. You can request anonymous or with-attribution posting, of course. Not all submissions will be selected for publication.